I’m a 20-something culture, media and tech junkie writing about why the most advertised-to generation connects to Snooki’s tan, parody Twitter accounts, torrenting music and attractive vampires. I'm also the managing editor of Reverb at the Denver Post. Find me on Twitter or subscribe to me on Facebook or whatever else kids do these days.

I’ve lived in Colorado my entire life, but this summer as my home state was ravaged by fires and shocked by the horrific shootings at the Aurora movie theater, I was 1,200 miles away.

It’s an odd feeling, being so far away from a community I am so close to when it’s facing such terrible events. For months I was alone a thousand miles away watching all of this unfold from my laptop.

But this isn’t about my own insecurities of being away when my home needed every bit of support; it’s about when the physical reactions of grief are taken away and the only thing you see is grief played out when you open up your computer and log onto Facebook.

My college town of Fort Collins, Colo. had its biggest fire in history this summer, the High Park fire, which burned nearly 90,000 acres, 259 homes and killed one person. I learned about it through a Facebook update.

I wasn’t there to choke on the smoke in town or offer my home to evacuees, instead I watched the foothills burn in slideshows on news sites. It was on Facebook, though, where I felt a little less helpless.

Pictures of signs posted by restaurants in town offering firefighters and evacuees a free meal, posts giving words of support for those who lost homes, even Instagram shots of smoky sunsets all connected me to the town.

These updates, I realized, wouldn’t be possible if I hadn’t had some sort of face-to-face relationship with each person I’m connected to online. Because I was/am part of the physical Fort Collins community—shook hands with them in person, hugged them, gotten a beer with them—the updates aren’t some stranger’s lives I’m watching performed like a reality TV show.

To my generation what we find in our digital, social world is real, and it has actual power beyond helping us procrastinate on our homework. Our lives, which evolve in the updates and photos, they are all real, and our generation has the ability to connect with friends and family regardless of physical space like never before.

My grandparents were evacuated in Colorado Springs from the Waldo Canyon fire that burned 18,247 acres, destroyed 346 buildings and killed two people. While my grandparents aren’t on social media, I was still able to follow the news and updates on the web. I was as much a part of it as I could be—to me the world at home had stopped and only focused on these events.

I lived in Colorado during the Columbine shooting and remember it clearly, but obviously this was before current social media. On July 20 I saw something I had never seen before, some of the most powerful uses of social media in reaction to an event so close to home. The day of the horrifying shooting at the Aurora movie theater, which is about 20 minutes from where I grew up, my Facebook and Twitter feeds were a digital vigil.

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